QUALITY - W 2014
Start date: Nov 1, 2014,
End date: Oct 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
Even if the tourism and services sectors are now facing difficult times, many areas in Italy have the requirements to set up centres for a new development model, based on the aware and sustainable use of local resources.
The main resource to count on is the human one, especially formed in prospect of the new generations who will have to be provided with suitable knowledge and skills, both professional and personal. In this framework, the QUALITY-W 2014 project, in which ‘W’ stands for ‘Welcoming’, takes into account the quality of welcoming guests as an issue to be investigated, in which to insert the learning programme that will be developed during the work experience.
The ‘quality of welcoming’ concerns the way one deals with guests and involves the ability to meet their requirements and understand their problems and cultural background. Moreover, it also concerns the guests’ feelings towards the management of the environment as a system, and therefore towards the appearance of the territory and the impact that structures and economic activities have on it.
Many skills involved in this field are based on personal gifts that the school, despite its educational efforts, cannot always develop and evaluate properly. Both the knowledge and the technical-operative skills need, through their application to the business reality, to be transformed into competences and to be constantly updated.
The school has been sensible to this formative issue for some time and has activated a path that, through the use of schemes such as school-work dual systems, tends to fill in these gaps. The ERASMUS+ programme, inside which the QUALITY-W 2014 project stands, offers a further opportunity by financing a mobility period of vocational educational training abroad.
The project is aimed at 90 students from a multi-regional network of three Vocational and Technical Secondary Schools’ (level ISCED 3). The schools are: IIS Celli, located in Cagli (Pesaro-Urbino, Marche), applicant; Ipssar S.Pellegrino Terme, in Val Brembana (Bergamo, Lombardia), and ITT M.Polo, in Rimini (Emilia-Romagna), co-applicants.
Students are attending the 4th and 5th (final) year; the profiles belong to the Catering, Tourism and Hospitality, Administration and Marketing sectors.
All the schools involved provide curricular work-experience periods (ASL) where students follow schemes based on the integration between theoric/practical education and internships in working environments.
Each mobility will last for 5-weeks; placements will be in the UK, France, Spain and Lithuania, in Summer 2015.
Abroad, the activities will be carried out with the support of formative agencies and companies which are familiar with the management of school-work dual system. There has been cooperation with sending and intermediary partnership with these agencies for some time.
The expected results are growth of communicative competences in foreign languages and acquisition of professional and personal competences that, integrated with school education, are going to increase the professional development and job opportunities.
The training abroad will be assessed and certified by the host institution and by the home institution under a MoU, so that the learning outcomes achieved by the participants will be pointed out and recognized through the issue of the Europass Mobility document and the Competences’ Certificate.
A remarkable role in the definition of the formative needs, in the recognition of the results and in their circulation, will be held by the Italian intermediary partners, i.e., local institutions, social partners, public body, economic organisations. The partners will be committed in the dissemination of results.